“Theresa May has told the head of the NHS that it will get no extra money despite rapidly escalating problems that led to warnings this week that hospitals are close to breaking point.
The prime minister dashed any hopes of a cash boost in next month’s autumn statement when she met Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, senior NHS sources have told the Guardian. Instead she told him last month that the NHS should urgently focus on making efficiencies to fill the £22bn hole in its finances and not publicly seek more than the “£10bn extra” that ministers insist they have already pledged to provide during this parliament.
She told him the NHS could learn from the painful cuts to the Home Office and Ministry of Defence budgets that she and Philip Hammond, the chancellor, had overseen when they were in charge of those departments, according to senior figures in the NHS who were given an account of the discussion.
Senior Whitehall sources have confirmed that Hammond’s statement on 23 November will contain no new money for the NHS, despite increasingly vocal pleas from key NHS organisations and the public’s expectation of extra health spending if Britain voted to leave the EU.
NHS Providers, which represents 238 NHS trusts, last week accused ministers of perpetuating “a bit of a fantasy world” on how well the NHS is doing after the worst-ever performance figures for key waiting time targets for A&E care, planned hospital operations and cancer treatments led to warnings that it was starting to buckle under the strain of unprecedented demand.
Health experts warned that the NHS would have to ration treatment, shut hospital units and cut staff if it gets no extra money soon.
Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust health thinktank, said: “If the government has firmly decided not to revisit NHS funding, this underlines that the health service faces four very difficult years. In particular, balancing the books in 2018 and 2019 when funding will flatline looks all but impossible with the current level of services.
“If more money from tax or borrowing is ruled out, the only choices left may be even less attractive, including reducing access and services, closures and reductions in staff,” he said.
Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, and Jim Mackey, the chief executive of the health service’s financial regulator, NHS Improvement, also attended the 8 September meeting, which was Stevens’ and Mackey’s first encounter with the prime minister.
“No 10’s message at the meeting was quite blunt and stark, that there will be no more money. Theresa May and Philip Hammond say that they presided over big efficiency programmes at the Home Office and MoD and didn’t whinge about it. Their view is that the NHS is already doing very well, but that’s head in the sand stuff,” said one NHS insider who was among those briefed on the meeting.
NHS leaders privately fear that May’s remarks indicate that she will be much tougher on the service’s pleas for more cash than David Cameron and does not appear to appreciate the extent of its deepening problems. She is said to be sympathetic to the view of many senior Treasury officials that, as one NHS source put it, “always giving the NHS more money is throwing good money after bad, like pouring water on to sand”.
May’s stance raises questions over the future of Stevens, who is preparing to give evidence on the NHS’s finances to the Commons health select committee on Tuesday. The NHS boss, who had a close relationship with Cameron and George Osborne, has recently irritated No 10 by publicly questioning the accuracy of the government’s claim – which May repeated at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday – that the NHS will receive £10bn extra by 2020.
He told the public accounts committee last month: “The government would record it as £10bn. The health committee recorded it a little differently. There is an apples and pears issue there.”
Stevens has welcomed the fact that the £8bn boost Osborne pledged during last year’s general election campaign was “frontloaded” to give the NHS £3.8bn more this year, a rise of 1.7%, as he had requested. But he highlighted that the service had not got the sums it needed for 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20. On current plans, it is due to receive increases of just 0.6%, 0.2% and 0.1% respectively, even though demand for core NHS services such as A&E care is rising at 3% or 4% a year.
Chris Ham, chief executive of The King’s Fund thinktank, said that any policy of providing no more money was unwise, “simply not credible” and would threaten standards of NHS care. “If these accounts are true, then it is clear that Downing Street does not yet fully understand the impact on patients of the huge pressures facing the NHS.
“The view from the top of government appears to be that the NHS has been given the extra money it asked for and should deliver what is expected of it. But this misses the point that demand for services is rising rapidly and the NHS is managing with the lowest funding increases in its history,” he said.
A Downing Street spokesman said he could not comment on what May, Stevens and Mackey had discussed because it had been a private meeting .”
East Devon Watch 
So the Leavers (esp. Boris) said we would get £350m per week for the NHS – and the reality is nothing.
And the leavers said we could retain access to the single market, but today the EU said the only possible brexit is a hard brexit where we lose access to the single market.
And the trade deals we will then be desperate to sign up to will be like TTIP where we cede sovereignty to US corporations, and may well include immigration quotas.
Meanwhile, when Leavers said that the economy doom-sayers were just scaremongering, but the pound is in free fall with foreign imports now costing nearly 20% more than a couple of months ago.
So just exactly how are the Leave voters getting what they voted for? Corporal Frazer had it right – we’re doomed, doomed.
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The elephant in the room in this eternal debate about the NHS being overspent is the method of accounting used to do the sums.
If you assume that existing buildings cost their repair and maintenance – which is a fact because, being publicly owned for the explicit purpose of delivering health care (or any other public service, such as passports or land registry or…) there is no rent to pay, and cancel all the PFI deals built on false interest rates (and while you are at it cancel any ability to get tax relief on interest payments that go out of the country, because those are obviously just siphoning profits to elsewhere). Add that lot together and you might find the NHS is not in deficit at all.
For too long we have had a fiction that there is a market for government provided services where profit and loss are involved. It’s like saying that the foreign office or the home office can be run on a profit and loss basis. They can’t and don’t. Only the mantra that only private healthcare is good because it is profitable sustains the stupidity that public services are a drain on the resource (of the government, but not of the people) and are therefore bad.
That is why we have a situation where politicians portray the NHS as being seriously in debt, solely because it suits them politically. Look around you and wonder why it is increasingly services are outsourced to major foreign owned contractors (who are intent on creaming off a profit) instead of being carried out nationally for a lower price. At the flick of an accountant’s pen the system could be showing a profit instead of a loss.
But the urge to privatise and sell off extremely valuable land assets is far higher, I suggest, than the desire to care for the elderly or infirm who have paid into the system all their working lives and now find the government, having taken the money, reneging on the deal. It is not the fault of the taxpayer if governments were profligate and failed to invest the NI income to provide against future claims, but preferred a model that said an ever increasing population with ever increasing taxes could always cover the costs. Maybe they didn’t factor in the offshore profit ‘scams’ that meant major profitable corporations pay less tax than private individuals?
Again, a bit of enforcement would have meant that the NHS was not, and never could be, in debt.
So, Teresa May, time to focus on a bit of actual transparency in the accounting. Cancel all the theoretical debts that don’t exist. Collect taxes due from the big boys instead of just hitting the soft targets of the PAYE and small businesses. And you never know, the Tories might actually get a majority the next time round.
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